​NSA, BND and MIT: Whose Big Brother is watching whom?

Dr. Can Erimtan is an independent scholar residing in İstanbul, with a wide interest in the politics, history and culture of the Balkans and the Greater Middle East. He attended the VUB in Brussels and did his graduate work at the universities of Essex and Oxford. In Oxford, Erimtan was a member of Lady Margaret Hall and he obtained his doctorate in Modern History in 2002. His publications include the book “Ottomans Looking West?” as well as numerous scholarly articles. In the period 2010-11, he wrote op-eds for Today’s Zaman and in the further course of 2011 he also published a number of pieces in Hürriyet Daily News. In 2013, he was the Turkey Editor of the İstanbul Gazette. He is on Twitter at @theerimtanangle

When news broke last summer that a certain NSA contractor had "leaked" an inordinate amount of secret data to various media outlets, global public opinion suddenly realized that the world we live in today does resemble the Orwellian dystopia 1984.

The National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden made
material available to journalist Glenn Greenwald, and the British
broadsheet The Guardian published its first Snowden-related
article on 5-6 June 2013. Greenwald laconically wrote then that
the "National Security Agency is currently collecting the
telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of
America's largest telecoms providers,” revealing the tip of
the surveillance iceberg that was made public by the contractor.
Edward Snowden outed himself as the NSA leaker on 9 June 2013
"in a video interview with Glenn Greenwald and Laura
Poitras."

Snowden fled from Hawaii to Hong Kong to Russia, where he was
granted temporary asylum that has recently been extended.
Originally allowed to stay one year, on 1 August he was given a
three-year extension.

The Snowden leaks revealed a whole host of top secret
surveillance programs, not just designed to spy on US citizens
(in true 1984 Big Brother style) but rather to cast a worldwide
web that appears to target virtually everybody anywhere: for
starters there is the program called PRISM, a mass electronic
data mining program launched in 2007 that collects data at the
ISP level (via "front door access to Google and Yahoo user
accounts through a court-approved process"), and that is
known to have been used for the purpose of spying on Venezuela,
for information on military procurement and its oil production;
but also on Mexico, for information regarding narcotics, the
country's internal security and political affairs; and also on
Columbia, for information on drug trafficking and the FARC.

Snowden also disclosed the existence of a program known as
MUSCULAR that can access data centers around the world, and is
operated jointly with the British GCHQ (Government Communications
Headquarters) located in Cheltenham (Gloucestershire). The
journalists Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani maintain that the
"NSA and the GCHQ are [routinely] copying entire data flows
across fiber-optic cables that carry information among the data
centers of the Silicon Valley giants,” that are the
companies Yahoo and Google. Or a program called XKeyscore, was
also divulged by Snowden – a program that "allows analysts to
search with no prior authorization through vast databases
containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of
millions of individuals" worldwide, as worded by Greenwald.

The worldwide ramifications of these NSA activities were really
exposed when news broke last October that Germany's Chancellor
Angela Merkel had been specifically targeted by NSA contractors,
acting on orders received from higher-ups. Allegations emerged
that Merkel's mobile phone was tapped by the US spy agency.

As a result, the German government, the Bundestag, convened an
NSA investigation committee. One of its members, the Green Party
MP Konstantin von Notz at the time remarked that he assumed that
"the tapping of Angela Merkel's cell phone must have involved
active decisions by real people, whereas the monitoring of 80
million Germans would have been a matter of algorithms and people
analyzing the results. Both actions amount to violations of
German law. Whether you have a human being or a computer opening
and scanning your letters for individual words, it's the same
thing, because government authorities have gained this
information.”

In fact, it even transpired that Merkel's predecessor; the Social
Democrat Gerhard Schroder's telephone calls had also been
monitored more than 10 years ago, arguably as a result of his
critical stance on the US Iraq policy. In the summer of 2002,
Schroder said that "[w]e are prepared to [show] solidarity.
But this country under my leadership is not available for [any
kind of] adventure". And so, the German Chancellor got
caught in an intricate NSA net. When this US surveillance of the
one-time German leader became public knowledge, Schroder went on
the record to say that he "would never have imagined that I
was being bugged by American services then, but now I am no
longer surprised". Merkel, in turn, said that "spying
among friends is not at all acceptable". As a result, the
United States, renowned for its enthusiastic role as the world's
policeman also became infamous as the contemporary's world's Big
Brother, watching or rather listening to every word spoken, not
just words expressed by potential terrorists or misunderstood
foreigners but also (and primarily) US citizens as well as
foreign leaders. Hence, Europeans felt reassured that America had
stepped across the line of common decency.

But now, it turns out, not just the US National Security Agency
(or NSA), but even the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (or BND) is
not above listening to its NATO allies. The well-respected and
renowned German periodical Der Spiegel has revealed that the BND
"accidentally" picked up a telephone conversation of US
Secretary of State John Kerry last year.

Kerry had been discussing the situation in the Middle East via a
satellite link and his words got caught in the surveillance net
spread by the BND (Der Spiegel literally uses the noun
'Beifang', a fishery term referring to additional prey
caught in a ship's fishing nets). The magazine continues that
words spoken by Kerry's predecessor Hillary Clinton had also
gotten caught in a similar BND surveillance network. The piece in
Der Spiegel maintains that one of Clinton's 2012 telephone
conversations with then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan had thus
been similarly apprehended by the German intelligence agency. But
much more sinister is the Spiegel claim that the German
government has been listening to Turkey's Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan for years now – since 2009, actually. In fact, the
still current BND "mission profile", dating back to 2009
and currently under review due to the NSA scandal, declares that
Turkey is regarded as an "official surveillance target"
of the German government.

Even though Germany has thus for years been routinely spying on
its ally Turkey, this news item somehow appears to evade Western
news cycles, instead sufficing to concentrate on the
"accidental" tapping of Kerry and Clinton. In Turkey, by
contrast, the news has been met with dismay and disgust.

In response, the Turkish government (currently still led by the
soon to be President Erdogan) has summoned the German Ambassador
Eberhard Pohl to provide a "formal and satisfactory
explanation" on Monday, 18 August 2014. The wily Turkish
Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said that the allegations are
"unacceptable, inexcusable and would require an
explanation,” going on to say that "[i]t is also a moral
responsibility that arises from our relationship as allies.”
Relations between Merkel and Erdogan have been strained for years
now, and this latest scandal does not augur well.

The BND was set up in 1989 and is directly accountable to the
office of the Chancellor. While in Turkey Erdogan has recently
reformed the nation's National Intelligence Organization’s (MIT),
transforming the organization into the Prime Minister's
Praetorian Guard, as I have argued. As such, I reasoned that a
"newinternet billin tandem with the new MIT
law would undoubtedly transform Turkey into an 'intelligence' and
'surveillance state', somewhat rivaling the US.”

As a result, it seems that President Obama was caught
eavesdropping on Chancellor Merkel, who now in turn has been
caught listening to PM (soon to be President) Erdogan . . . In
view of the fact that Turkey has for years been courting Germany
and other European nations in order to join the EU -- actually
dating back to September 1959 when Ankara applied for associate
membership of the then-European Economic Community (EEC) -- these
latest revelations could very well undermine Turkey's resolve to
stay the course as a NATO and aspiring EU member. On 9 November
2010, Recep Tayyip Erdogan told the Reuters news agency that
“We have been kept waiting at the gates of the EU for 50
years. We are still waiting and waiting and still in the
negotiating process.” Erdogan added that public opinion in
Turkey was becoming “offended with the situation,” and
that “[s]ince the game [of accession negotiations] started
[on 17 December 2004], new rules have been brought into the
game.” Germany under Merkel, as the EU's strongest and
wealthiest member, has been opposed to Turkish accession, and the
2009 BND "mission profile" seems to indicate a level of
distrust seldom encountered amongst allies. In 2011, Tayyip
Erdogan said the following: “I have no secret agenda. I am
explicit in everything I say. If the reality among the Europeans
is ‘We don’t want Turkey among us,’ then they should say it
clearly. I will accept it, with pleasure!”

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.